They were the ones like Del, who acknowledged it plainly, once, and then held out a hand and pulled me back toward the living, toward the gutters and the trucks and the suppers, toward the ordinary business of being a man who was still, whether he’d noticed or not, alive.

Chapter 4 — Men Don’t

Here is a thing nobody tells you about being a man of a certain age: you forget how to make a friend, and worse, you forget that you’ve forgotten.

I’d had friends, once — in college, early in my career, the fathers of my daughter’s friends.

But they’d been friends of circumstance, of proximity, and they’d faded one by one as the circumstances changed, until by my fifties my whole social world ran through Carol.

She was the one who kept up with people, who made the plans, who remembered the birthdays.